I’ve realised recently that I really am getting older.  Somewhere along the way I moved past childhood. And that’s the complicated thing about being a teenager. There is no marked point at which you are supposed to suddenly BE mature. It’s this strange void in the progression in life that is absent of all concrete definition. When you stop being a child is completely relative.

But now that I’ve realised that this maturity has, in fact, snuck up on me I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with it. Everyone says the ultimate goal in life is happiness. But everyone is telling me different ways to go about that. My school, in close kinship with the Catholic church, tells me that its Catholicism (to hell with that method). My mom tells me it’s having and raising children. Some of my friends tell me it’s looking nice and some tell me it’s laughing. Some guys tell me that it’s loving them. My swim coach tells me it’s swimming fast. Really, I need to decide that for myself.
The main delima it’s come down to for me is whether or not I should fully embrace my maturity.  Embracing it would entail thinking about the future and what I want in life and just thinking in general.  Maturity has a lot to do with my personal perception of reality, which is ultimately a pessimistic yet realistic view. Addressing this pessimism that is centered around the shallow nothingness that humanity has become and attempting to circumvent the doom of it is my definition of maturity. And that fucking sucks. It’s stressful and weary and a shit ton of work and thinking. But it would give me an end result to be proud of.
Yet still, on the other hand, I could find happiness in the simple regression back to a childish perception of reality.  I could live in a partial fantasy in which life is my oyster.  I could participate in conversations to achieve laughter, not necessarily any other benefit, just laughter. I could be happy in the mere simplicity.
But the problem is that the truth lies in accepting my maturity.  Trying to carry out the facade that I’m still a child would be a complete lie, and I cannot do that.  So it looks like I will just have to work my ass off?

My graduation is tomorrow. And this is exactly how I will imagine the moment in my mind.
 

I don’t understand. I’m too young for all of this. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I believe. I don’t know where I want to go or how I want to get there. I don’t know what love is. I don’t know what I think is wrong or right in this life.

I’m still a child.

I thought I was this big bad (almost) adult for graduating highschool and being told I’m beautiful by strangers on the street. But that isn’t growing up.  Even thinking that those things are growing up is just a childish illusion. That is just what we’re told when we are 6 years old and the best thing you can possibly imagine your life to amount to is being 17 and having a cute boyfriend and a high school diploma in hand. But at some point that fantasy changes and we become self functioning creatures who can conjure up their own goals and beliefs. The tricky thing is just synchronizing those two things together: getting older and setting your own goals.

Otherwise you get stuck in this fucktard mess of someone setting their goal to be you and feeling something towards you that you don’t even understand because you didn’t think you were old enough to even begin to contemplate its meaning.

It’s all a beautiful mess now. I’m an old overgrown child.